In June of 1923, a 20-year-old Columbia University freshman named Henry Louis Gehrig walked into the New York Yankees clubhouse for the first time. He had signed with the team two months earlier for $1,500 and a $2,000 bonus, dropping out of college to join a baseball roster anchored by the most famous athlete on Earth.

Babe Ruth was 28 years old. He was sitting on a stool tying his shoes. The Yankees trainer, Doc Woods, walked the rookie over and made the introduction. And what Babe Ruth said about Lou Gehrig over the next 16 years in the dugout, at the most famous farewell ceremony in the history of American sport, and finally in a 1947 magazine interview a year before his own death, has aged into the most haunting prophecy any teammate has ever spoken about another.

To understand what Babe Ruth saw in Lou Gehrig, you have to understand what Ruth was when Gehrig arrived. In June of 1923, Babe Ruth was already the most famous athlete in the world. He had hit 59 home runs two years earlier in 1921. He had hit 41 in 1923 on the way to a .393 batting average. He was making $52,000 a year from the Yankees, more than the president of the United States.

He had moved into a new ballpark in the Bronx that newspapers had already nicknamed The House That Ruth Built. He had revolutionized baseball almost single-handedly by turning the home run into the central act of the sport. The dead ball era was over because of him. Pitchers were terrified of him. Children were named after him.

 Ty Cobb, the greatest hitter of the previous generation, hated him because Cobb knew his own era was being eclipsed. The 1923 Yankees won the World Series that October, the first championship in franchise history, and Babe Ruth was the most powerful force in American sports. And then, in June of that summer, a 20-year-old Columbia first baseman walked into his clubhouse, and Ruth looked at him for the first time.

What Ruth saw was something that almost no one else in baseball saw. He saw the next him. He saw a left-handed hitter built like a piano with the kind of raw power that only Ruth himself had previously possessed, with a swing the Yankee scouts had been comparing to Ruth’s since the kid was 19 years old at Columbia.

The scout who signed Gehrig, Paul Krichell, had been writing internal reports to the Yankees front office for months, calling Gehrig the next Babe Ruth. Krichell had watched Gehrig hit a 450-ft home run on April 28, 1923, at Columbia’s South Field that landed at 116th Street and Broadway. He had seen Gehrig hit some of the longest home runs ever witnessed on Eastern college campuses.

He had signed him for a pittance, $1,500 plus a $2,000 bonus, because Gehrig’s family needed the money, and Gehrig himself was too quiet and too modest to negotiate. Krichell brought the kid up to Yankee Stadium in June of 1923 to take batting practice in front of Babe Ruth. Gehrig hit ball after ball into the right field seats.

 Ruth watched from the dugout. Ruth said nothing to the reporters, but what Ruth did over the next two seasons, while Gehrig bounced between the minor leagues and a backup role on the Yankees bench, was the most documented act of mentorship in the history of the franchise. Babe Ruth, who had no children of his own that he claimed at the time, who had grown up in a Baltimore orphanage, being mentored by a man named Brother Matthias, took Lou Gehrig under his wing and taught him how to hit a baseball.

The proof of that mentorship comes from Babe Ruth himself. In a long magazine interview he gave to Bob Considine of the International News Service on February 23rd, 1947, Ruth was 52 years old. He was in a New York hospital dying of throat cancer with 16 months left to live. Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers Hall of Famer, had just come out of retirement to play one more season at age 36.

Greenberg visited Ruth’s hospital room. Ruth handed Greenberg a bat and then spoke. He said he was going to tell Greenberg something, Hank. He asked for the bat and then said he was going to show the whole secret of how he hit those home runs. Then Ruth said the line that has become one of the most cited pieces of evidence of the Ruth-Gehrig partnership in all of baseball history.

He said, “The only fellow I ever told it to was Lou Gehrig. When poor Lou first came up to the Yanks and Miller Huggins was trying to make a left field hitter out of him.” Ruth showed the grip and said, “See how this grip makes your wrist break at the right moment.” He explained it throws the whole weight of the bat into the ball and that with this grip you just have to follow through.

He said he had kept it a secret a long time. Babe Ruth, dying in a hospital bed in February of 1947, told Hank Greenberg that he had only ever shared the secret of his home run grip with one other player in his entire major league career. That player was Lou Gehrig. Ruth taught him the grip when Gehrig was 22 years old in 1925, struggling to break into the Yankees lineup and struggling to hit major league breaking balls.

What happened to Lou Gehrig from that moment forward is the story of the greatest mentorship a teammate has ever given another in the history of American sport. On June 1st, 1925, Yankees manager Miller Huggins put Lou Gehrig in the starting lineup as a pinch hitter for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger. The next day, June 2nd, Yankees regular first baseman Wally Pipp showed up to the ballpark complaining of a headache.

Huggins gave him the day off. He put Gehrig at first base. Gehrig went three for five with a triple. Wally Pipp never played first base for the Yankees again. Gehrig started every Yankees game for the next 14 seasons. The streak began that day, June 2nd of 1925, and would not end until May 2nd of 1939, 2,130 consecutive games later.

From the moment Lou Gehrig became the Yankees everyday first baseman, what he did at the plate was exactly what Babe Ruth had been telling people he would do. He hit 295 with 20 home runs and runs batted in his rookie year in 1925. He hit 313 with 16 home runs and 112 runs batted in 1926, the year the Yankees lost the World Series to the St.

 Louis Cardinals in seven games. And then 1927 happened. Lou Gehrig hit 373 with 47 home runs and 173 runs batted in. He was 24 years old. He won the American League Most Valuable Player Award. Batting in front of him in the third spot of the Yankees lineup, Babe Ruth hit .356 with 60 home runs, breaking his own single-season record of 59 that he had set in 1921.

Ruth was 32 years old. Together, batting third and fourth in the same lineup, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig combined for 107 home runs and 339 runs batted in during the season of 154 games. The Yankees won 110 games. They swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. They were called Murderers’ Row. The 1927 New York Yankees are still considered by almost every credible baseball historian to be the greatest single team in the history of Major League Baseball.

The lineup hit .307 as a team. The pitching staff led the league in earned run average. The team outscored its opponents by 376 runs over the course of the season, which is still a record. They clinched the American League pennant on Labor Day and finished 19 games ahead of the second-place Philadelphia Athletics.

They swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series in four straight games. By multiple accounts, the Pirates lost the World Series the moment they watched Ruth and Gehrig take batting practice before Game One at Forbes Field. The engine of the lineup, the part that made the team unstoppable, was the back-to-back combination of the two greatest left-handed hitters in the American League batting consecutively in front of each other.

Pitchers could not pitch around Babe Ruth because Lou Gehrig was on deck. Pitchers could not pitch around Lou Gehrig because Babe Ruth had just hit. Gehrig more fastballs in 1927 than any hitter in the American League because the alternative was walking him with Ruth coming up next. Through July and August, the two men chased each other for Ruth’s home run record.

 They tied at 24 home runs in late June. They were never separated by more than two home runs through the entire summer. Gehrig took the lead, 45 to 44, in the first game of a double header at Fenway Park in early September. Ruth responded with two home runs of his own in the second game and took the lead back for good. He finished with 60.

 Gehrig finished with 47. It was the closest anyone in baseball history had ever come to Babe Ruth’s home run pace, and the man who had come that close was the kid Ruth had personally taught how to hit 2 years earlier. The 1927 Yankees were not a team built around Babe Ruth. They were a team built around the partnership between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

And the partnership, by every documented account from teammates Waite Hoyt and Bill Dickey and Joe Dugan, was a genuine friendship for the first 6 years of it. Ruth and Gehrig traveled together. They roomed together on the road. They barnstormed together in the off-season under the names Babe Ruth’s Bustin’ Babes and Lou Gehrig’s Larrupin’ Lou’s, playing exhibition games across the country with sandlot teams and minor league clubs for a share of the gate receipts.

They went on a famous trip through Omaha, Nebraska, where they met a chicken named Lady Amco, who was a world champion at laying eggs, and Ruth, mid-tour, called her the Babe Ruth of chickens. They were photographed together hundreds of times. They were the most famous one-two punch in the history of baseball.

And Babe Ruth, the older man, the mentor, the bigger star, never once in those early years complained about Lou Gehrig taking his thunder. He had taught the kid the grip. He had taught the kid how to hit. And he was proud of what the kid had become. Then it ended. The story of how the Ruth and Gehrig partnership fell apart is one of the strangest fragments of baseball history because the cause was almost too small to matter.

In the early 1930s, Babe Ruth’s second wife, Claire, made a public comment about Lou Gehrig’s mother, Christina. The exact wording has been debated by biographers for 90 years. Some accounts say Claire criticized the way Christina Gehrig dressed Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor. Other accounts say Claire made a remark about Christina’s German heritage.

The historian Tony Castro, who wrote the most thorough book about the Ruth and Gehrig relationship in 2018, places the responsibility on Christina Gehrig as the larger source of the rift. What is certain is that Lou Gehrig was abnormally devoted to his mother. Christina had raised him in poverty in the German neighborhoods of Manhattan.

She had worked as a cook and a housekeeper to put him through Columbia University. She was the most important person in Lou Gehrig’s life, more important than his wife, Eleanor, more important than his teammates, more important than baseball itself. And when Claire Ruth said something dismissive about Christina, Lou Gehrig stopped speaking to Babe Ruth.

He stopped speaking to him in 1934, the year Ruth’s final season with the Yankees. He stopped speaking to him through 1935, when Ruth went to the Boston Braves. He stopped speaking to him through 1936, when Ruth retired entirely and tried unsuccessfully to become a major league manager. He stopped speaking to him through 1937 when Ruth gave the interview that made the feud worse and through 1938 when the streak was still active and Gehrig was 35 years old and still playing every day.

For 5 years the two most famous teammates in baseball history did not speak and during those 5 years Babe Ruth said the thing that may have been the most prophetic thing any teammate ever said about another. In January of 1937 Babe Ruth told the Associated Press a line that has been printed in every Gehrig biography written in the 89 years since.

Ruth warned that he thought Lou was making one of the worst mistakes a ball player can make by trying to keep up that iron man stuff. He said Lou had already cut 3 years off his baseball life by it. Ruth told him he ought to learn to sit on the bench and rest and that they were not going to pay off on how many games he had played in a row.

Then Ruth said the line that became in retrospect almost unbearably accurate. He warned the next 2 years would tell Gehrig’s fate and that when his legs go they will go in a hurry. The interview ran in newspapers across America. Lou Gehrig was incensed. Through a Yankee spokesman careful never to mention Ruth by name in his response Gehrig fired back.

He said he did not see why anyone should belittle his record or attack it. He said he had never belittled anyone else’s. He said he was not stupid enough to play if his value to the club was endangered. He said he honestly had to say that he had never been tired on the field. Gehrig was 33 years old in January of 1937.

He believed deep in his bones that he would play forever. Babe Ruth said this in January of 1937. Lou Gehrig played the entire 1937 season and batted 351 with 37 home runs and 159 runs batted in. It was one of the best offensive seasons of his career. He looked on the surface exactly as he had at age 28. He played the entire 1938 season at age 35 and his numbers fell off a cliff for the first time in his career.

He hit 295. His home runs dropped from 37 to 29. His runs batted in dropped from 159 to 114. Something was wrong. This was the start of a painful decline. By spring training of 1939, his legs would not respond to ground balls. He was missing pitches he had hit for 15 years. He was tripping over the dugout steps.

Teammates began whispering. On May 2nd, 1939 in Detroit, Lou Gehrig walked into manager Joe McCarthy’s office and took himself out of the lineup. He told McCarthy he was hurting the team. The streak ended at 2,130 consecutive games. Gehrig was 35 years old. Six weeks later, on June 19th of 1939, his 36th birthday, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota told him he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The diagnosis came in a private letter the Mayo Clinic sent to the Yankees front office signed by Dr. Harold Habain, a letter that is still preserved in the National Baseball Hall of Fame archives. Lou Gehrig had 2 years to live. Babe Ruth’s January 1937 warning that Gehrig’s legs would go in a hurry was now medical fact.

Ruth had been right. He had been more right than anyone in baseball had ever been about anyone in the entire history of the sport. It was in this moment with Lou Gehrig dying of a disease no one in America had heard of, with the streak over and the career over and the body failing, that the Yankees organized the most famous farewell ceremony in the history of American sport.

They called it Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. They scheduled it for Independence Day, the 4th of July 1939, between games of a double header against the Washington Senators at Yankee Stadium. They invited every surviving member of the 1927 Yankees, the team Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had built together 12 years earlier.

Mark Koenig came, Bob Meusel came, Tony Lazzeri came, Earl Combs and Waite Hoyt and Bill Dickey and Wally Pipp, the man Gehrig had replaced at first base on June 2nd, 1925, came. He came. He arrived at Yankee Stadium in a cream-colored suit, looking tanned and rested. He sat in the visiting clubhouse with the rest of the 1927 team.

 And when the moment came, between games of the double header, when 61,808 fans crammed into Yankee Stadium and the microphones were set up behind home plate, Babe Ruth walked out onto the field with the rest of his old teammates and stood beside the dying Lou Gehrig. The ceremony lasted 40 minutes. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia spoke.

 He called Gehrig the greatest prototype of good sportsmanship and citizenship. Postmaster General James Farley spoke. He said that for generations to come, boys who play baseball would point with pride to Gehrig’s record. And then, as the master of ceremonies Sid Mercer introduced him, Babe Ruth took the microphone.

In his own blustering style, with no notes and no preparation, Ruth gave his unqualified opinion that the 1927 Yankees were better than the 1939 Yankees, who had won the previous year’s World Series. He said the line that has been quoted in every Gehrig biography written since. He said that in 1927, Lou was with us, and he said that that was the greatest ball club the Yankees ever had.

He added that that was his opinion. When Lazzeri pointed out that there were only about 13 or 14 of them present, Ruth said, “Shucks, we only need nine to beat them.” And then, quietly, before he handed the microphone back, Babe Ruth said the last thing he would ever say in public about Lou Gehrig’s future. He said that he knew Lou was going to keep that stiff upper lip, and that he was going to keep on going.

Ruth knew when he said that line into the microphone in front of more than 60,000 fans that Lou Gehrig had 2 years to live. Ruth had visited him in the hospital. He had seen what the disease was doing. He knew Gehrig was not going to keep on going. He said it anyway, because the only thing left to say at a farewell was something hopeful, and Babe Ruth had finally found the thing he could say.

Then Gehrig stepped to the microphone. He had not planned a speech. His wife Eleanor confirmed afterwards that he had nothing written down. He stood with his head bowed, silent, until the chance of “We want Gehrig” rolled across the stadium and Sid Mercer told the crowd that Lou was too moved to speak.

 Then Gehrig wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and walked back to the microphones. He spoke for 2 minutes without notes. The speech was 277 words long. He said that for the past 2 weeks people had been reading about a bad break he got, but that that day he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. He thanked his teammates.

 He thanked the fans. He thanked his wife. He thanked his mother and father. He thanked the groundskeepers and the office staff. He closed by saying that he had a tough break, but he had an awful lot to live for. He stepped back from the microphone. The vast crowd, which the New York Times the next day described as having sat in absolute silence for a longer period than perhaps any baseball crowd in history, erupted.

And Babe Ruth, who had not embraced Lou Gehrig in 5 years, who had been silent through the entire feud, who had been told by Eleanor Gehrig at the Mayo Clinic that her husband would be dead within 24 months, walked across the home plate area and threw his enormous arms around Lou Gehrig. The band began playing the song “I Love You Truly”.

The crowd chanted “We love you, Lou”. Ruth whispered something in Gehrig’s ear that nobody on the field could hear and that has never been published. Whatever it was, it made Lou Gehrig crack a small smile for the first time all day. The New York Times the next morning called the embrace one of the most touching scenes ever witnessed on a ball field.

The photograph of the embrace became one of the most reproduced images in the history of American sport. It is the photograph that hangs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It is the photograph that ran on the front page of every major American newspaper on the morning of July the 5th, 1939.

The feud was over. Babe Ruth, the man who had taught Lou Gehrig how to hit, the man who had warned him about the streak two years too late, the man who had been right about everything, was holding the dying Lou Gehrig in his arms while 61,800 eight people watched. Lou Gehrig played no more games. He served as the Yankees captain through the rest of the 1939 season, sitting in the dugout, watching the game he could no longer play.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by a special election in December of 1939, becoming the first player ever inducted on the strength of a single emergency vote, and the youngest player at age 36 ever inducted in the history of the hall up to that point. His career numbers, when the dust settled, were almost unimaginable.

He had played 17 seasons. He had hit 493 home runs, the third most in major league history at the time of his retirement, behind only Babe Ruth and Jimmie Fox. He had a lifetime batting average of 340. He had a lifetime slugging percentage of 632, which is still the third highest in baseball history, behind only Babe Ruth and Ted Williams.

He had a lifetime on-base percentage of 447. He had been a seven-time All-Star. He had won the Triple Crown in 1934. He had won two Most Valuable Player awards. He had won six World Series championships, more than any player in his era other than Babe Ruth. He had played 2,130 consecutive games, a record that would stand for 56 years until Cal Ripken Jr.

of the Baltimore Orioles broke it on September 6th of 1995. And every one of those numbers Babe Ruth had predicted in some form when Gehrig was a 22-year-old rookie trying to make the Yankees, and Ruth had taken him aside and shown him the grip that had built Murderers’ Row. Lou Gehrig died on June 2nd of 1941, exactly 16 years to the day after Wally Pipp had given up his job.

He was 37 years old. ALS, the disease that killed him, would forever after be called Lou Gehrig’s disease in the United States. The Yankees retired his uniform number, the number four, the day after he died. It was the first uniform number ever retired by any team in any professional sport in North America. Babe Ruth attended the wake at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverdale, New York.

By multiple accounts, including the songwriter Fred Fisher, who was close to the Gehrig family, Ruth showed up visibly intoxicated, which infuriated Gehrig’s widow Eleanor and his mother Christina. The Gehrig family had not forgiven Ruth for the years of silence or for what Claire Ruth had said about Christina a decade earlier.

A photograph from the wake of Ruth standing alone beside Gehrig’s open casket made its way into the New York newspapers the following morning, an image that became one of the strangest in baseball history because of the visible isolation Ruth carried in the frame. Eleanor blocked Ruth from playing a substantial role in The Pride of the Yankees, the 1942 Hollywood film that turned Lou Gehrig’s life story into the most successful sports movie of its era and earned 11 Academy Award nominations.

The producer Christy Walsh argued, eventually successfully, that to tell the life story of Lou Gehrig without some reference to Babe Ruth would be box office suicide. Ruth was permitted to appear in the film playing himself, but the family kept him at arm’s length and his scenes were carefully limited.

 Babe Ruth himself died 7 years later on August the 16th of 1948 of the same throat cancer that had ravaged him through the interview with Hank Greenberg in 1947. He was 53 years old. He had outlived Lou Gehrig by 7 years and 3 months. He had outlived the partnership by 14. He had spent the years between Gehrig’s death and his own working on his autobiography.

The autobiography in which he wrote about Lou Gehrig more honestly than he ever spoke about him in public and the only public record we have of what Babe Ruth thought about Lou Gehrig from the period after Gehrig had died is the line Ruth gave to Bob Considine in that Philadelphia Inquirer interview from February of 1947 when Ruth told Hank Greenberg the truth he had carried for 22 years.

 He had told Lou Gehrig the secret of his grip. He had taught him how to hit. He had watched the kid become the second greatest left-handed hitter in baseball history. The only player he had ever shared the secret with and the only player he believed was worthy of it was Lou Gehrig. What Babe Ruth was right about in the end was bigger than any single quote can capture.

He was right that Lou Gehrig would be the second him. He was right that the partnership would produce the greatest team in baseball history. He was right in his January of 1937 warning that the streak would kill Gehrig’s body. He was right on the 4th of July 1939 that the 1927 Yankees with Lou Gehrig were the greatest team the franchise ever had.

And he was right in his hospital bed in February of 1947 that the one player in baseball history he had been willing to teach the secret to was the one player who had been worthy of it. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig fought for 5 years over a comment about a mother. They reconciled at home plate in front of 61,808 people on Independence Day of 1939.

They died 3 years apart. They are buried in different cemeteries in New York State. Gehrig in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla. Ruth in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, 8 miles apart. Their headstones are within a 30-minute drive of each other. Their numbers, three and four, are retired side by side on the wall of Yankee Stadium in Monument Park.

 In the order they batted, exactly the way Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig stood in the on-deck circle from 1925 through 1934. The most famous and most accurately prophesied partnership in the history of American sport. The grip Ruth taught the rookie in 1925 built 493 home runs, a triple crown, two most valuable player awards, and six World Series rings.

The warning Ruth gave the streak in 1937 came true within 24 months. The hug at home plate in 1939 ended 5 years of silence. After Gehrig died, the only public sentence Ruth ever spoke about their partnership was that he had shared the secret only with Lou Gehrig. Babe Ruth was right about Lou Gehrig. He had been right since the first day he saw him swing a bat in June of 1923.

And the only player he ever told the secret to was the only one who needed to hear it. Like and subscribe for more baseball documentaries. Until next time.